


Impenitent

by ObliObla



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Devil Face (Lucifer TV), Gen, Identity Issues, One Shot, Season/Series 04, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-13 05:35:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20169001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: Lucifer’s skin couldn’t contain him.For Lucifer Bingo prompt: mea culpa





	Impenitent

Lucifer’s skin couldn’t contain him.

Either it was his wings, clawing their way from his back, or his burnt and ravaged flesh, bursting at the seams. There was a rattling inside where bones shifted against each other, desperate to tear him apart.

His hands were shaking.

He was standing in his penthouse, staring down at the trembling fingertips, feeling them separate from himself—someone else’s hands, filled with all the cruelty he had watched them mete out. But only he was to blame.

There wasn’t anyone else left.

Red skin tore at his arms, emerging broken and feverishly warm. Adle or ague, he felt the corruption grip at him, turning him bitter and twisted and raw. He reached for his ring to ground himself, but it slipped from his fingers, plummeting to the ground, too far out of reach for limbs that wouldn’t behave, wouldn’t obey, regardless of what he bid.

Once a king—he couldn’t even command himself now.

The wings made known their desire to emerge, and he shivered, wracked with sudden nausea at those things they’d become, the leather more a torment even than the feathers. At least feathers knew what it was to fall.

There was nothing angelic left in him.

That was what he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? But now that it was true, that brilliant, wrenching knowledge only burned him further, cast down to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire.

He couldn’t feel his feet.

A tremor swept over him, and he fell to his knees, a supplicant to a creature he could never be again, to a light so faint he could no longer perceive it. It was all darkness, now. All oblivion. All ruin.

But desolation had never been a comfortable bedfellow, and wrath shot through him. He was the light bringer; he may exist in nothing but night, but only in tenebrae could one truly see the stars. Only in the stillness of the grave could one hear them sing.

Those glittering jewels he had affixed to silence like a brooch on the throat of creation, cold and unfeeling, but so close to the rush of blood and passion. And he, too, had stood on the verge of meaningfulness, watching hearth fires burn in a place called home. Cast out into the cold and the void, he had taken that ice within his soul, piercing a weaker heart with the strength of hatred and rage.

He dragged himself to his feet. He would not plea, would not beg. Even broken and bleeding at the edge of Heaven he had not asked for mercy, had not prayed.

Perhaps he should have. Perhaps…

_No_. It was better to reign in Hell, wasn’t it? Even if it stripped away everything he had called himself, left with nothing but the shackles of his freedom. Abandoned to anger and grief and pain. And he had built himself a kingdom from the ashes of his fractured, immolated form. Had made a fiery sacrifice on the altar of consequences, dedicated to the god of his failures.

_His fault. His fault. His most grievous fault._

He clenched his jaw and tasted blood, savoring the tang of existence even now. For hadn’t he survived worse than this? Hadn’t he emerged from that tortured crucible far more refined, strengthened, even? Couldn’t he play the fool as he had on that grand stage? This was only a little play; he could be its clown.

Wasn’t derided better than forgotten?

Hadn’t blame sustained him through eons of agony? Blame set against his father, blame set against himself—it was all the same, now. He _was_ the god of his own transgressions, the lord of futility and the prince of mortifying penance. He could punish himself, could condemn his own flesh to abasement. And there, in a Hell he made for himself, he would be that masochist in his wretched little cell.

_Burn me. Freeze me. Hurt me._

_Don’t ever forget me. I promise I’ll be good._

_I promise._


End file.
